An array antenna is composed of multiple antenna units according to a certain distribution mode, mainly used for improving an antenna system performance including gain. Each antenna unit in the array antenna is an independent unit and can be an omnidirectional antenna or a directional antenna. The distribution of antenna units can be linear, ring, plane or solid. According to the array antenna technology, all the antenna units cooperate to perform receiving and transmission of user signals in different environment. Generally, according to the array antenna technology, a weighting parameter of a transmission signal on each antenna unit is computed and determined by estimating a received signal and a combining receiving and/or transmission of the antenna array signal according to the computed weighting parameter. Specifically, according to the traditional antenna transmission technology, all the received signals on all the antenna units are processed to determine the weight coefficient of each antenna unit. Here, the processing of the received signals adopts technologies such as Receiving and Transmission Beam-forming, Receiving Diversity and Close Loop Transmit Diversity.
In the traditional technology, the processing of the array antenna signal based on the parameter estimation is as follows:
a) determining a number M of the antenna units in the currently used array antenna wherein the number of the antenna units is also called the dimension of the array antenna and each antenna unit corresponds to one-channel signal;
b) processing the received M-channel signals and obtaining a feature parameter estimation of the user wherein processing the received signals with different methods can obtain different feature parameters of the user, for example, if a user direction-of-arrival (DOA) is estimated on the received M-channel signals, then after the channel estimation, correlated matrix computation, spectrum estimation on the M-channel signals, the DOA of the user can be obtained and the obtained DOA is referred as the feature parameter of the user.
c) estimating the weight coefficients of all the antenna units based on the obtained feature parameters of the user wherein a function with the beam-forming weight coefficient as the feature parameter can be used to perform the estimation.
The above processing of the array antenna signals shows that the computation amount of the array antenna signals will increase with the increase of the antenna units and the main computation amount is to compute the weight coefficient of each antenna.
In addition, for a complex wireless environment, the array antenna receives the signals in a complex way. Generally, signal fading in different antenna unit is different. If an antenna unit is in a status of deep fading, the reliability of the received signal is reduced and in this case, it is necessary to solve the problem of how to improve the reliability of the received signal by effectively using all the antenna units.